Father Payne eBook

“No, I don’t think that is better,”
said Father Payne, “because it means a sort
of blindness. It is very curious in the case of
Browning, because he learned exactly how to do things.
He had his method, he fixed upon an abnormal personality
or a curious incident, and he turned it inside out
with perfect fidelity. But after a certain time
in his life, the thing became suddenly heavy and uninteresting.
Something evaporated—­I do not know what!
The trick is done just as deftly, but one is bored;
one simply doesn’t care to see the inside of
a new person, however well dissected. There’s
no life, no beauty about the later things. Wordsworth
is somehow different—­he is always rather
noble and prophetic. The later poems are not
beautiful, but they issue from a beautiful idea—­a
passion of some kind. But the later Browning
poems are not passionate—­they remind one
of a surgeon tucking up his sleeves for a set of operations.
I expect that Browning was too humble; he loved a
gentlemanly convention, and Wordsworth certainly did
not do that. If you want to know how a poet should
live, read Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals
at Grasmere; if you want to know how he should feel,
read the letters of Keats.”

XXXIII

OF MEEKNESS

I had been having some work looked over by Father
Payne, who had been somewhat trenchant. “You
have been beating a broken drum, you know,” he
had said, with a smile.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s
poor stuff, I see. But I didn’t know it
was so bad when I wrote it; I thought I was making
the best of a poor subject rather ingeniously.
I am afraid I am rather stupid.”

“If I thought you really felt like that,”
said Father Payne, “I should be sorry for you.
But I expect it is only your idea of modesty?”

“No,” I said, “it isn’t modesty—­it’s
humility, I think.”

“No one has any business to think himself humble,”
said Father Payne. “The moment you do that,
you are conceited. It’s not a virtue to
grovel. A man ought to know exactly what he is
worth. You needn’t be always saying what
you are, worth, of course. It’s modest to
hold your tongue. But humility is, or ought to
be, extinct as a virtue. It belongs to the time
when people felt bound to deplore the corruption of
their heart, and to speak of themselves as worms,
and to compare themselves despondently with God.
That in itself is a piece of insolence; and it isn’t
a wholesome frame of mind to dwell on one’s
worthlessness, and to speak of one’s righteousness
as filthy rags. It removes every stimulus to
effort. If you really feel like that, you had
better take to your bed permanently—­you
will do less harm there than pretending to do work
in the value of which you don’t believe.”

“But what is the word for the feeling which
one has when one reads a really splendid book, let
us say, or hears a perfect piece of music?” I
said.